Slate's editor-in-chief -- who recently gave a lecture titled
"Celeb Baby Bump: Pregnant Oscar Winner Natalie
Portman (PHOTOS) - How to Make Great Web Journalism in
an Age of Content Farms, Search Engine Optimization, and Idiotic
Celebrity Slideshows" -- runs a site that has been producing
quality content for 15 years, well before Google changed the
game.

In a chat with Advertising Age's
Simon Dumenco, he worried about the current
state of journalism jobs.

"[The industry] is heavily dominated by new jobs that require a
lot of speed and a lot of quasi-journalistic skills that are
high-adrenaline, and they can be really fun jobs, but they're
missing certain things," he said. "What Slate is trying to do is
recognize that our greatest success, and the way that we
differentiate ourselves, is by producing more durable kinds of
journalism -- journalism that is entrepreneurial and ambitious
and has a distinct voice and isn't a recapitulation of everything
else that's out there."

That is a fair assessment. Plenty of newer publications use SEO
tricks to boost traffic. (We should know; we are one of them.) It
is standard practice in these times.

But Slate, with its award-winning Slate Labs and other enterprise initiatives,
is vocal in its avoidance of such tactics.

So it surprised us when Poltz talked about one of the reasons for
the improved traffic to his publication's site.

Last year, Slate hired a new head of technology named Dan
Check. How has the former employee of Catalist, a
political-data-mining operation, altered Slate's approach?